‘Pirates’ Take Over Amazon with ‘Free’ MP3 Downloads: Will This Affect Amazon Vs. iTunes Competition in DRM Free Market?

The UK launch of ‘Amazon MP3′ is the content e-retailer’s answer to Apple’s iTunes, means that digital consumers now have a choice for digital downloads. But not before Amazon also gets a rival of its own in the form of a Firefox plugin released yesterday called ‘The Pirates of the Amazon’, .

Albums via Amazon start at £3 and songs at 59p, compared to iTunes songs at 79p each. Amazon negotiated for the 3 million songs available with 4 big recording companies to be free of DRM, or Digital Rights Management. This means that once you’ve paid up, you can move the songs to any device you own, a flexibility that most customers would appreciate.

However, Amazon’s mp3 downloads having only 256kps quality as opposed to 320kps mp3s offered by some competitors, which includes the latest Firefox add-on, ‘Pirates of the Amazon’, which not only links to potentially higher quality of the songs, but cheekily integrates a ‘Download 4 Free’ button using the Firefox Greasemonkey script.

The plugin allows users to get any songs they want without paying a single penny by linking to ‘free’ copies on torrent website The Pirate Bay. In fact, according to website TorrentFreak, this even works even with CDs, DVDs, games, books, and any products that can be converted digitally.

The plugin site has currently been taken down, announcing that “The Ship was hit. We’re offline”. However, not all hope sank with it, as TorrentFreak has provided a backup copy of the xpi file add-on.

Bitterwallet has no affiliations with this offshore download website due to, ahem, potential legal implications.

Free of DRM or Digital Rights Management, fuck me that is good. Ahoy there me hearties, I never knew what a torrent was or where to get free music, DVD’s and Games, I do now, cheers BW, and fuck you Amazon.

free, that’s right, all those actors and technicians and songwriters do it for fun and live in a land where there are no mortgages and dinner grows on trees. You didn’t know how to nick things and now you do, bully for you, and fuck Amazon for spending years and millions of quid building an online store offering decent prices and bringing you half the bargains that appear on UKHD.

@Mike: Fuck you amazon? For giving you the option to buy DRM free tracks instead of shitty DRM tracks, binding you to a subscription? Sure, things like itunes where your freedom is taken away by DRM, those are fine, but amazon give you freedom and you kick dirt in their face? This is what makes companies that don’t deserve to go bust, go bust.

I for one am happy that Amazon have gone DRM free. The DRM on iTunes is ridiculous and the sooner it’s gone the better. Jobs said they only had it b/c they were forced too and the Amazon situation is calling his bluff. Still no change though…

For over a year now Job’s actually talked about lifting DRM on music. At the same time he’s one of the biggest shareholders in Walt Disney but doesn’t want the same for video content. The stubborn old man.

its about time somebody else took on that itunes carp…. i hate apple and ipods they produce carp quality sound for a high end price…make you use their format and try and lock you to 1 computer….scammers

Good for Amazon, DRM music is a bullshit concept thought up by greedy rich people. I grew up recording music from the chart show, copying from vinyl to tape & then tape to tape! If you pay for it you should be able to use it however you want, companies like apple make it an easy choice for people to download non-DRM music for free. They are to blame for some of the illegal download culture.

A brand which is so familiar to customers offering variable and low pricing for DRM free downloads will shake the market up – At We7 we believe that these are features our customers want as well as free full-track streaming, free downloads and plenty of content from indie labels not yet offered on Amazon. We also believe that decent editorial is very important for music discovery. Re pirate sites – with the advent of free, legal and easier to use, safer ad-funded alternatives like We7 – it is bound to become a minority of people who can be bothered to use sites like Pirates of the Amazon every time they want to listen to new music.